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It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some

It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some people don't like the idea of adding more buttons to the UI because it can make it look cluttered and confusing, but rather than just adding padding around everything, why not make the icons higher resolution and maybe slightly bigger to take up the increased available screen real estate? I'm sick of people associating "modern" with "good" and "dated" with "bad". Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. And IMO, they're just plain ugly, but that's a matter of personal opinion. Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.

ChrisLTD 3y ago
The only app that I use on a daily basis that doesn't cram in tons of white space is Safari on MacOS. IntelliJ used to be good about this, until they rolled out their new theme.
- MBCook 3y ago
  I’ve found I really like the new UI, but I may have also turned on some kind of compact mode.
  - ChrisLTD 3y ago
    Yes, the compact mode definitely helps, but it's a bit of a wonder that it's even necessary.
anthk 3y ago
I find Zukitre fine on modern unix/bsd's, it's the only flatish time (among the Tango icon theme) which looks fine to use daily without playing Whack-A-Mole.
spiffytech 3y ago
I discussed the whitespace issue with a Google engineer some years back, when Material UI was the hot new thing and lowering UI density became trendy. He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
- seydor 3y ago
  > high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, did he give any references?
  - Alupis 3y ago
    These types of people are the reference. They make decisions, deploy it to millions of devices, and collect data. Doesn't' mean they're right, of course.
    - seydor 3y ago
      Yeap, and what did the data say
      - Narishma 3y ago
        The data says whatever you interpret it to say.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  I get that, but I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as I mentioned, the flat style hides discoverability, so I think it offsets the usability gains from making the UI appear less cluttered. So sure, maybe extra real estate means we can allow UI elements to breathe a bit, but keep the 3D look on elements that can be interacted with. Buttons should still be buttons. Text should be text. Interactable buttons should not be merely an icon or text.
  - 3y ago
jwells89 3y ago
I was fond of many of the third party visual styles that used to be available for XP and 7. They brought visual flair and personalization while maintaining a level of contrast and legibility as good as that of the Classic theme or better and leaving padding/margins/whitespace in tact.
- mickelsen 3y ago
  Definitely, Windows 7 not only used fewer resources than Vista but also had its upgraded UI with good scaling and smooth fonts, plus a better taskbar and clever window management extras, like snapping. The overall experience was less annoying as third party software had already adapted to the new user permissions system and other quirks over the years. After 7, I switched to Mac, and even after all these years, I still have fond memories of that OS. Every time I tried a new Windows version, they seemed to have gone downhill.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >Windows 7 not only used fewer resources than Vista Windows 7 didn't use less resources than Vista, it was virtually the same, it's just that PCs have gotten miles faster in the timespan between Vista and 7 and people thought it was the OS that improved (think going from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo, from 256/512 MB to 2GB RAM, spinning rust to SSD). 7 was not that much different from Vista, the problem was that when Vista launched, most people still had Windows 9/XP level hardware and that's what most PC retailers were still selling as well, at least on the budget end, and expected Vista to run the same on the same HW, while Vista demanded more as it was a complete overhaul from Windows XP/9. 7 didn't improve much performance wise from Vista, it's just that by that time people had already upgraded to much better hardware, and they felt a massive performance improvement. By most metrics, 7 was basically a Vista Service Pack, renamed to distance itself from the bad press Vista got, but it was more or less Vista under the hood, but it's the better HW that brought the speed bump. If you were to review both OSs side by side, you wouldn't notice a speed difference.
    - atesti 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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sirsinsalot 3y ago
Don't even get me started on the car crash that is the Microsoft Word ribbon
- sundvor 3y ago
  It's easily bested by Word's file save "dialogue" (which is akin to a mini os of its own!).
  - empyrrhicist 3y ago
    Or the helpful Windows 11 right-click folder context menu... where you have to click again for more options to do advanced things like "paste", and the only way to get rid of it is to edit the registry. What The Actual Fuck Is Happening. /rant Edit: and also, since they've shoved OneDrive/Teams/O365/SharePoint/Etc down our throats you'd think there'd be a clear and obvious interface for sharing a file within this new, enlightened context menu... except that's mysteriously an icon and not a labelled option like the rest of the options instead. Great for discovery!
    - vel0city 3y ago
      > where you have to click again for more options to do advanced things like "paste", You don't, there's a paste option in the very first row when there's something in the clipboard that can be pasted.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        > You don't, there's a paste option in the very first row when there's something in the clipboard that can be pasted. Haha. This is in the spirit of "you haven't created any files on this computer so all file operations are disabled for you".
      - perryizgr8 3y ago
        That icon is so nondescript that I am never sure if it is the right one. Older past icons used to be so clear.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. It feels to me that the more advanced graphics and display technologies become, the less GUIs make use of them. 32-bit colors with panels rendering billions of beautiful colors? Naw, black and white only. Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading. Panels refreshing at 360Hz and faster powered by GPUs costing a few grand and CPUs with two dozen cores? Naw, response times are so last century. Enough RAM to fit the entirety of Unicode including emoticons for love hotels and smiling poo? Naw, obscure hieroglyphs baby. There's a part of me wondering if those command line warriors with their luscious neckbeards were right about GUIs being the inferior interface.
- hooverd 3y ago
  As always, it depends. I like DBeaver when I'm poking around a database and the relevant CLI when I'm running migrations. CLIs are so powerful when you get them, but confusing when you don't. There are certain ones I always have to read the man page for. I like a tree style file browser over ls but prefer cd and mkdir and touch for moving around. I wish more applications were like AutoCAD (that is they have the combined GUI and command palete), although it's been a minute since I used it.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading. There’s nothing quite like trying to hit the narrow grab handle of a borderless window with a white title bar on top of a window full of white content. There’s no way Microsoft’s designers are actually using the stuff they’re making IMO.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I read somewhere that MS' designer mostly use OSX.
xupybd 3y ago
Have you seen the latest update by Jetbrians on the Rider UI. It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time. There is so much more room. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new-ui-preview-for-your-jetbrains-ide/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...
- iquatemb 3y ago
  I personally didn't like the new UI, I prefer the old one, and switched back immediately when I saw it after upgrading. I will stay until they eventually force me to use the new one. From the comments in that blog post it seems I'm not the only one.
  - xupybd 3y ago
    UI changes can be very polarizing. It was bold of them to make the change. I can understand why it would put you off if you don't like it.
- ta988 3y ago
  I really enjoy their new UI, it is so much more practical and spacious.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  Looks heavily inspired by VS Code to me
  - edu 3y ago
    Agree, first thing it came to my mind looking at the screenshot.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  I saw this when it got posted and all I think is...Are you kidding? That UI is absolutely horrid. Everything is hidden. It is complete and utter unusable garbage that has no business being in an application being used by professionals. > Meanwhile, the UI trends in the industry have evolved, No, they've devolved. That's what this entire thread is about. > and many of our new users tell us that the UI appears heavyweight Your "new users" are likely your lowest common denominator user. They're beginners at coding and haven't learned all the things that they're going to want a single click away. > and dated. Dated? Dated is good. > Our goals were to reduce visual complexity A goal that sounds noble, but really isn't. > provide easy access to essential features By hiding them behind unintuitive buttons that don't even have any text? Just a meaningless icon? > It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time. 110% disagree. They dumbed down the UI considerably. > There is so much more room. Even in 1080p, I think JetBrains IDEs have just enough room. In 1440p, it's great. I upgraded to 4K recently and I have more room than I know what to do with. Are you using a 14" laptop monitor or something?
bluedino 3y ago
The main title bar is full of crap now in the current version of Office. I like to think that every single one of those was a pet project of some PM at Microsoft, and they have them on their stupid resume.
loeber 3y ago
100% agreed. Modern software has thrown out the design idioms that were so common throughout the '90s and early '00s in Windows (and Macintosh!) software. I wrote a blog post about what happened: https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design
- specialist 3y ago
  Good OC. Thanks. The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps. The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them. That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
  - andai 3y ago
    Show me one site that still looks/feels like Flash. (Actually, the more the merrier!)
    - brirec 3y ago
      Flash is such a terrible choice for this analogy. Probably the one thing Flash sites all had in common was that they had nothing in common.
      - stanjo 3y ago
        [dead]
  - anthk 3y ago
    Multimedia and games were designed to be standalone, they interacted with themselves and that's it. Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
- hnick 3y ago
  It feels like you jumped past something that I remember being a big deal - The Ribbon. I remember when Office introduced it, and people hated it. It goes against your comment on using words instead of icons. But it seems like a useful solution for programs as feature lists grow and menus (and even sub-menus) become unwieldy so I've made my peace. Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!
cycomanic 3y ago
I seem to read that post completely different to you. The way I read it is that they are complaining that there are too many GUI elements (mainly toolbars), taking away screen real estate from the writing canvas. But why optimise for an 800x800 resolution (which would essentially give you lots of empty real estate if you have a higher resolution)? I really don't get this post?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It’s 2023. We should not be “optimizing” for any particular resolution, or for any form factor for that matter. I expect to be able to use Product X on a 5k wide screen iMac display without the content being a tiny 4cm column down the center of the screen. I expect to be able to use the same Product X on a low resolution entry level Android device running Firefox without having to zoom to see things. I expect to be able to use Product X while blind, with a screen reader. I expect to be able to use Product X via an API from a terminal running cURL. We have let the visual designers run mad and it is killing software.
  - zo1 3y ago
    I think the fix is simple. All new software needs to be done in the absence of UX folk. Seriously. From my side I'm going to continue excluding UX folk from all future development unless it's an explicitly new-user facing app on a mobile device.
    - pantulis 3y ago
      > All new software needs to be done in the absence of UX folk. Seriously. This needs further clarification. What kind of software would that be? I read your previous sentence as "I can do the work UX folk do", but you don't seem to be implying that UX is not important, right?
      - roelschroeven 3y ago
        UX is very important, but the somehow it seems that the result of UX folks getting involved often does not result in a better UX. There have never been UX experts than there are today, yet many people feel the quality of UX is going down instead of up.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Disagree. Windows 7 already had major regressions from XP, which was the peak of MS's UI evolution. Microsoft did more to advance the GUI through the '90s than anyone else (certainly including Apple), but since then has regressed into sheer, blundering incompetence.
- stelonix 3y ago
  What were those regressions in your opinion? I liked XP a lot but I don't remember being bothered by 7 and I'm pretty bad at changing UIs.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, 7 introduced stupid "transparent" UI and removed (or attempted to bury) the color-scheme editor. This is a particularly brain-dead move, because from Windows 3.1 until well into the 2000s you could create your own system-wide color scheme that would be honored by all properly-written applications. So I used a charcoal scheme (what today is trumpeted as "dark") for a decade... but then right before the rest of the planet realized that inverse (white background, black text) color schemes are stupid, Microsoft REMOVED the ability to set up a "dark" one. Then there is the baffling (and still present) fuckery of the user directories in Explorer. There are all kinds of shadow copies of your user directories that are "forbidden." WHY? WTF is all of that shit? I think they also removed (or, again, buried) the ability to organize your programs into groups in the Start menu. WTF are they thinking? I want to put all of my graphic-editor apps together. I want to put all of my audio apps together. Then I want another group for my office/productivity apps. But NO! MS thinks I want everything in a giant, disorganized pile. Or I want them organized by VENDOR name. What the ever-loving shit would I want that for? There are little regressions everywhere. Another one is in Explorer. Originally, Explorer would show + signs next to directories that were not empty. I think it was Windows 7 where they stopped showing those... unless you happened to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer; then they would suddenly appear. WHY? Are we supposed to sweep the cursor across every pixel on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Absolutely retarded. And eventually MS abandoned the universally-understood + sign in favor of a stupid TRIANGLE to disclose additional contents. The + sign is fucking UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD to mean "additional." WTF is a triangle supposed to mean? I'm so glad the world has largely moved on from Windows, because it is a disgrace. I'm just bummed because I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but it would require me to buy and set up an expensive Windows system. NO WAY. Looks like X-Plane for me.
sundvor 3y ago
My personal bugbear (on top of the whitespace) in Windows 10 is how you cannot enforce application borders anymore. Every second application wants to do its own thing, "for aesthetics". I absolutely hate it. All the app windows just blend into one, it's just so hard to see them.
- wolpoli 3y ago
  I upgraded to Windows 11 specifically for the rounded corners to help tell my windows apart.
- squokko 3y ago
  I don't know what you mean by this comment. Can you elaborate? Are you talking about the window border?
  - hnick 3y ago
    I don't know about the setting, but when I have Visual Studio and Github Desktop on dark mode, they'll often overlap and it's not obvious which window I am clicking on if I'm trying to snag the title bar to move one. Also, even basic Explorer windows often lose their borders when logging in via RDP, leading to white on white mayhem, but I've always assumed that's a bug.
    - magic_hamster 3y ago
      Great example. Whatever happened to the fat colorful window borders? I miss Aero.
    - sundvor 3y ago
      Yep exactly this. VSCode lets you set a "Title Bar Style" setting to "native", but that was a seriously hard find. It would blend into Teams, where only a hideous "high contrast" mode would render borders. The list keeps going on and on. I've used a registry "hack" (manually added a setting) to set the colour of inactive windows, this does improve things a bit when it works. I prefer eg a dark grey as inactive, and eg orange for active window. I'm blocked from upgrading my work PC to Windows 11 unfortunately.
22c 3y ago
I ended up thinking "I bet I can stick half the old UI in that "Styles" section on the new UI, turns out you can and still have plenty left over. I put the remainder of the elements on top of their new counterparts. https://imgur.com/a/N5H9QTH https://imgur.com/a/N5H9QTH
marcosdumay 3y ago
> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace If you look harder, the icons are larger. Single icons got replaced by more explanatory content. The "expands" symbol is larger. And there are more actions crammed into the toolbar. Also, yes, there's a lot of whitespace. But let's not forget the reason MS redesigned the office toolbars. It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen. This was true only for people who didn't know how to use a computer. And the fault was on MS side. By default, after installation, every MS Office program had the screen filled with toolbars. And, surprise, surprise, today is the same. The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. And you cannot have individual toolbars anymore. It is all or nothing. And this is for the native programm. The "web" version is a total disaster in GUI design.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. Which wasn't a problem in ye olde times with 4:3 screens dominating the landscape, but nowadays is with 16:9 screens.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Like I said before, everything is a fashion magazine these days. It's pretty to look at.. but it also causes distraction, because when you can't see everything you need, you're forced to scroll, swipe, or tab out of your focus. The big problem with tabbing out is that HN is right around the corner.
ernst_klim 3y ago
I think the whitespace issue is mostly due to the ubiquity of touch interfaces. Even a good chunk of laptops do have touchscreens now, so deskop designers have to consider them even if they didn't eat the adaptive pill. With computer mouse you can use much smaller and denser controls of course.
- dumdumchan 3y ago
  Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. This is what made the old UI look organized.
  - citrin_ru 3y ago
    Mobile first touch friendly design dominates designer minds. It looks modern and fresh. Desktop friendly UI unfortunately looks dated, old-school and rarely used nowadays even for desktop only apps.
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      I predict that in a couple years, someone will produce an app that uses old "dated" UI styles and people will suddenly praise it for being clear and intuitive. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
  - tiagod 3y ago
    >Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads. > I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?). My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this). -- [1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks. [2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch [3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons [4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!
KronisLV 3y ago
> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. I wanted to see how LibreOffice would compare on my netbook, and frankly it's better than the new Word, but still "worse" than the old version: https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png That said, at least LibreOffice lets you have your custom themes and actually offers a variety of different interface layouts, which I think is a nice touch: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface > Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation. To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with this. That's also why I rather enjoyed the Redmond theme even in *nix distros. There's just something so very usable about the old Windows look and more modern attempts, such as SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/ and even ReactOS https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
deleted 3y ago
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perryizgr8 3y ago
> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation. Everything about that theme was perfection. If you disable all kinds of animations, then it becomes even better.
kwanbix 3y ago
100% agree. The first time I noticed, I came up with the name "toy interfaces". They look very nice but have very little substance. And to think that one of the most versatile and used interfaces is a spreadsheet, which has very dense information. Talking about old vs new, you would never convince me that the abomination that is the ribbon is better than the previous interface (menus/icons).
angryzor 3y ago
This is a very tech-literate user opinion on this matter. Having lived together with a UI designer for over 5 years I have come to appreciate the art and science of UI design. Whereas before I would have had the same opinion, I can now better see a UI through the eyes of an end user, and the larger amount of white space is definitely an improvement. It's about allowing space for your eyes to rest, it's about providing clear compartments in the UI that pop out immediately, instead of a compressed mess where everything seems to blend together. Ideally you should know where to click seconds after deciding you want to do something, even as a new user. UI design is not just some designer deciding that something looks good and just doing it that way. UI/UX design is not some "beautiful interaction layer" that you put on top of the actual "real part" of the application. A lot of software developers (me included originally) seem to think that way, I don't know why, maybe it's a bias in education. UI design is an integral part of the software development process, and I would argue more important than the programming itself. In fact, it should be the primary source of decisions that we make in our choices behind the software development process, not the other way around. UI/UX design is the art and science of looking at your product the way a user would look at it, making it as accessible and intuitive as possible. It is the art and science of making the product that your user wants and needs, instead of whatever you think they need. The decisions made in UI design (like "adding more whitespace") are not made arbitrarily. They are not made because someone thinks it looks pretty. They are the result of years of user research and A/B testing, just like our programming paradigms are the result of years of research. It would be arrogant to dismiss all this effort by millions of people based on personal opinion. That being said, the Office ribbon is a complete clusterfuck, and kind of the worst example you can find of modern UI design. That also being said, I do think the original post is making a false comparison. Of course UI's will be designed to fit the technology of their age. If you only have limited screen space you want to conserve it as much as possible, hence why the toolbar approach was chosen for Word 97, as even screens of 1024x768 resolution were rare back then. The ribbon UI was designed for an age where larger screens were common and it could be afforded to take up more pixels. In fact if you were to put a 40px toolbar on a modern 4K screen it would be tiny, hard to see and hard to click on. Putting the modern ribbon UI on an old 800x600 screen that it was not at all designed for is pushing an agenda.
jug 3y ago
> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. Maybe sometimes it is, but not in the article. The article in fact has multiple problems. 1. The titlebar of the _host virtual machine_ is included in the offensive version. This is probably not a coincidence but to exaggerate the issue. 2. The ribbon bar that combines the title bar and menu bar of old in fact consumes _less_ precious vertical space. 3. The icon spacing is roughly the same in both screenshots. 4. The major "offender" in white space is the different layout being used but that has nothing to do with UI design but everything to do with giving plenty of space for header and footer editing, and showing "real life" page margins -- the print layout! The Word 9x screenshot doesn't use/have that display mode. It's not WYSIWYG. That display mode can usually be disabled, at least in the latest Word versions. Case closed. It's a rubbish article especially because this CAN be a problem in modern UI's and there are plenty of better examples.
rwmj 3y ago
You might like Haiku with its glorious 90s GUI. Very discoverable and incredibly responsive.
albrewer 3y ago
> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX I held on to Windows 7 until the EOL date and I was forced to upgrade by my company for this reason. Minimal padding, clear borders and drag targets, high contrast coloring, no animations; it was far better usability-wise.
Borg3 3y ago
Hell yeah. Im still using my dated Win2003 desktop (classic theme) to do most work. Clear UI, fast. When I have to use my corpo Win10 I get chills. Terrible UI, slow UX, everything just gets in the way so you cannot do your job.

ChrisLTD 3y ago

The only app that I use on a daily basis that doesn't cram in tons of white space is Safari on MacOS. IntelliJ used to be good about this, until they rolled out their new theme.

MBCook 3y ago
I’ve found I really like the new UI, but I may have also turned on some kind of compact mode.
- ChrisLTD 3y ago
  Yes, the compact mode definitely helps, but it's a bit of a wonder that it's even necessary.

anthk 3y ago

I find Zukitre fine on modern unix/bsd's, it's the only flatish time (among the Tango icon theme) which looks fine to use daily without playing Whack-A-Mole.

spiffytech 3y ago

I discussed the whitespace issue with a Google engineer some years back, when Material UI was the hot new thing and lowering UI density became trendy. He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.

seydor 3y ago
> high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, did he give any references?
- Alupis 3y ago
  These types of people are the reference. They make decisions, deploy it to millions of devices, and collect data. Doesn't' mean they're right, of course.
  - seydor 3y ago
    Yeap, and what did the data say
    - Narishma 3y ago
      The data says whatever you interpret it to say.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
I get that, but I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as I mentioned, the flat style hides discoverability, so I think it offsets the usability gains from making the UI appear less cluttered. So sure, maybe extra real estate means we can allow UI elements to breathe a bit, but keep the 3D look on elements that can be interacted with. Buttons should still be buttons. Text should be text. Interactable buttons should not be merely an icon or text.
- 3y ago

jwells89 3y ago

I was fond of many of the third party visual styles that used to be available for XP and 7. They brought visual flair and personalization while maintaining a level of contrast and legibility as good as that of the Classic theme or better and leaving padding/margins/whitespace in tact.

mickelsen 3y ago
Definitely, Windows 7 not only used fewer resources than Vista but also had its upgraded UI with good scaling and smooth fonts, plus a better taskbar and clever window management extras, like snapping. The overall experience was less annoying as third party software had already adapted to the new user permissions system and other quirks over the years. After 7, I switched to Mac, and even after all these years, I still have fond memories of that OS. Every time I tried a new Windows version, they seemed to have gone downhill.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Windows 7 not only used fewer resources than Vista Windows 7 didn't use less resources than Vista, it was virtually the same, it's just that PCs have gotten miles faster in the timespan between Vista and 7 and people thought it was the OS that improved (think going from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo, from 256/512 MB to 2GB RAM, spinning rust to SSD). 7 was not that much different from Vista, the problem was that when Vista launched, most people still had Windows 9/XP level hardware and that's what most PC retailers were still selling as well, at least on the budget end, and expected Vista to run the same on the same HW, while Vista demanded more as it was a complete overhaul from Windows XP/9. 7 didn't improve much performance wise from Vista, it's just that by that time people had already upgraded to much better hardware, and they felt a massive performance improvement. By most metrics, 7 was basically a Vista Service Pack, renamed to distance itself from the bad press Vista got, but it was more or less Vista under the hood, but it's the better HW that brought the speed bump. If you were to review both OSs side by side, you wouldn't notice a speed difference.
  - atesti 3y ago

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sirsinsalot 3y ago

Don't even get me started on the car crash that is the Microsoft Word ribbon

sundvor 3y ago
It's easily bested by Word's file save "dialogue" (which is akin to a mini os of its own!).
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  Or the helpful Windows 11 right-click folder context menu... where you have to click again for more options to do advanced things like "paste", and the only way to get rid of it is to edit the registry. What The Actual Fuck Is Happening. /rant Edit: and also, since they've shoved OneDrive/Teams/O365/SharePoint/Etc down our throats you'd think there'd be a clear and obvious interface for sharing a file within this new, enlightened context menu... except that's mysteriously an icon and not a labelled option like the rest of the options instead. Great for discovery!
  - vel0city 3y ago
    > where you have to click again for more options to do advanced things like "paste", You don't, there's a paste option in the very first row when there's something in the clipboard that can be pasted.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      > You don't, there's a paste option in the very first row when there's something in the clipboard that can be pasted. Haha. This is in the spirit of "you haven't created any files on this computer so all file operations are disabled for you".
    - perryizgr8 3y ago
      That icon is so nondescript that I am never sure if it is the right one. Older past icons used to be so clear.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. It feels to me that the more advanced graphics and display technologies become, the less GUIs make use of them. 32-bit colors with panels rendering billions of beautiful colors? Naw, black and white only. Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading. Panels refreshing at 360Hz and faster powered by GPUs costing a few grand and CPUs with two dozen cores? Naw, response times are so last century. Enough RAM to fit the entirety of Unicode including emoticons for love hotels and smiling poo? Naw, obscure hieroglyphs baby. There's a part of me wondering if those command line warriors with their luscious neckbeards were right about GUIs being the inferior interface.

hooverd 3y ago
As always, it depends. I like DBeaver when I'm poking around a database and the relevant CLI when I'm running migrations. CLIs are so powerful when you get them, but confusing when you don't. There are certain ones I always have to read the man page for. I like a tree style file browser over ls but prefer cd and mkdir and touch for moving around. I wish more applications were like AutoCAD (that is they have the combined GUI and command palete), although it's been a minute since I used it.
donmcronald 3y ago
> Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading. There’s nothing quite like trying to hit the narrow grab handle of a borderless window with a white title bar on top of a window full of white content. There’s no way Microsoft’s designers are actually using the stuff they’re making IMO.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I read somewhere that MS' designer mostly use OSX.

xupybd 3y ago

Have you seen the latest update by Jetbrians on the Rider UI. It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time. There is so much more room. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new-ui-preview-for-your-jetbrains-ide/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...

iquatemb 3y ago
I personally didn't like the new UI, I prefer the old one, and switched back immediately when I saw it after upgrading. I will stay until they eventually force me to use the new one. From the comments in that blog post it seems I'm not the only one.
- xupybd 3y ago
  UI changes can be very polarizing. It was bold of them to make the change. I can understand why it would put you off if you don't like it.
ta988 3y ago
I really enjoy their new UI, it is so much more practical and spacious.
HideousKojima 3y ago
Looks heavily inspired by VS Code to me
- edu 3y ago
  Agree, first thing it came to my mind looking at the screenshot.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
I saw this when it got posted and all I think is...Are you kidding? That UI is absolutely horrid. Everything is hidden. It is complete and utter unusable garbage that has no business being in an application being used by professionals. > Meanwhile, the UI trends in the industry have evolved, No, they've devolved. That's what this entire thread is about. > and many of our new users tell us that the UI appears heavyweight Your "new users" are likely your lowest common denominator user. They're beginners at coding and haven't learned all the things that they're going to want a single click away. > and dated. Dated? Dated is good. > Our goals were to reduce visual complexity A goal that sounds noble, but really isn't. > provide easy access to essential features By hiding them behind unintuitive buttons that don't even have any text? Just a meaningless icon? > It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time. 110% disagree. They dumbed down the UI considerably. > There is so much more room. Even in 1080p, I think JetBrains IDEs have just enough room. In 1440p, it's great. I upgraded to 4K recently and I have more room than I know what to do with. Are you using a 14" laptop monitor or something?

bluedino 3y ago

The main title bar is full of crap now in the current version of Office. I like to think that every single one of those was a pet project of some PM at Microsoft, and they have them on their stupid resume.

loeber 3y ago

100% agreed. Modern software has thrown out the design idioms that were so common throughout the '90s and early '00s in Windows (and Macintosh!) software. I wrote a blog post about what happened: https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design

specialist 3y ago
Good OC. Thanks. The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps. The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them. That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
- andai 3y ago
  Show me one site that still looks/feels like Flash. (Actually, the more the merrier!)
  - brirec 3y ago
    Flash is such a terrible choice for this analogy. Probably the one thing Flash sites all had in common was that they had nothing in common.
    - stanjo 3y ago
      [dead]
- anthk 3y ago
  Multimedia and games were designed to be standalone, they interacted with themselves and that's it. Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
hnick 3y ago
It feels like you jumped past something that I remember being a big deal - The Ribbon. I remember when Office introduced it, and people hated it. It goes against your comment on using words instead of icons. But it seems like a useful solution for programs as feature lists grow and menus (and even sub-menus) become unwieldy so I've made my peace. Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!

cycomanic 3y ago

I seem to read that post completely different to you. The way I read it is that they are complaining that there are too many GUI elements (mainly toolbars), taking away screen real estate from the writing canvas. But why optimise for an 800x800 resolution (which would essentially give you lots of empty real estate if you have a higher resolution)? I really don't get this post?

ryandrake 3y ago
It’s 2023. We should not be “optimizing” for any particular resolution, or for any form factor for that matter. I expect to be able to use Product X on a 5k wide screen iMac display without the content being a tiny 4cm column down the center of the screen. I expect to be able to use the same Product X on a low resolution entry level Android device running Firefox without having to zoom to see things. I expect to be able to use Product X while blind, with a screen reader. I expect to be able to use Product X via an API from a terminal running cURL. We have let the visual designers run mad and it is killing software.
- zo1 3y ago
  I think the fix is simple. All new software needs to be done in the absence of UX folk. Seriously. From my side I'm going to continue excluding UX folk from all future development unless it's an explicitly new-user facing app on a mobile device.
  - pantulis 3y ago
    > All new software needs to be done in the absence of UX folk. Seriously. This needs further clarification. What kind of software would that be? I read your previous sentence as "I can do the work UX folk do", but you don't seem to be implying that UX is not important, right?
    - roelschroeven 3y ago
      UX is very important, but the somehow it seems that the result of UX folks getting involved often does not result in a better UX. There have never been UX experts than there are today, yet many people feel the quality of UX is going down instead of up.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Disagree. Windows 7 already had major regressions from XP, which was the peak of MS's UI evolution. Microsoft did more to advance the GUI through the '90s than anyone else (certainly including Apple), but since then has regressed into sheer, blundering incompetence.

stelonix 3y ago
What were those regressions in your opinion? I liked XP a lot but I don't remember being bothered by 7 and I'm pretty bad at changing UIs.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, 7 introduced stupid "transparent" UI and removed (or attempted to bury) the color-scheme editor. This is a particularly brain-dead move, because from Windows 3.1 until well into the 2000s you could create your own system-wide color scheme that would be honored by all properly-written applications. So I used a charcoal scheme (what today is trumpeted as "dark") for a decade... but then right before the rest of the planet realized that inverse (white background, black text) color schemes are stupid, Microsoft REMOVED the ability to set up a "dark" one. Then there is the baffling (and still present) fuckery of the user directories in Explorer. There are all kinds of shadow copies of your user directories that are "forbidden." WHY? WTF is all of that shit? I think they also removed (or, again, buried) the ability to organize your programs into groups in the Start menu. WTF are they thinking? I want to put all of my graphic-editor apps together. I want to put all of my audio apps together. Then I want another group for my office/productivity apps. But NO! MS thinks I want everything in a giant, disorganized pile. Or I want them organized by VENDOR name. What the ever-loving shit would I want that for? There are little regressions everywhere. Another one is in Explorer. Originally, Explorer would show + signs next to directories that were not empty. I think it was Windows 7 where they stopped showing those... unless you happened to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer; then they would suddenly appear. WHY? Are we supposed to sweep the cursor across every pixel on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Absolutely retarded. And eventually MS abandoned the universally-understood + sign in favor of a stupid TRIANGLE to disclose additional contents. The + sign is fucking UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD to mean "additional." WTF is a triangle supposed to mean? I'm so glad the world has largely moved on from Windows, because it is a disgrace. I'm just bummed because I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but it would require me to buy and set up an expensive Windows system. NO WAY. Looks like X-Plane for me.

sundvor 3y ago

My personal bugbear (on top of the whitespace) in Windows 10 is how you cannot enforce application borders anymore. Every second application wants to do its own thing, "for aesthetics". I absolutely hate it. All the app windows just blend into one, it's just so hard to see them.

wolpoli 3y ago
I upgraded to Windows 11 specifically for the rounded corners to help tell my windows apart.
squokko 3y ago
I don't know what you mean by this comment. Can you elaborate? Are you talking about the window border?
- hnick 3y ago
  I don't know about the setting, but when I have Visual Studio and Github Desktop on dark mode, they'll often overlap and it's not obvious which window I am clicking on if I'm trying to snag the title bar to move one. Also, even basic Explorer windows often lose their borders when logging in via RDP, leading to white on white mayhem, but I've always assumed that's a bug.
  - magic_hamster 3y ago
    Great example. Whatever happened to the fat colorful window borders? I miss Aero.
  - sundvor 3y ago
    Yep exactly this. VSCode lets you set a "Title Bar Style" setting to "native", but that was a seriously hard find. It would blend into Teams, where only a hideous "high contrast" mode would render borders. The list keeps going on and on. I've used a registry "hack" (manually added a setting) to set the colour of inactive windows, this does improve things a bit when it works. I prefer eg a dark grey as inactive, and eg orange for active window. I'm blocked from upgrading my work PC to Windows 11 unfortunately.

22c 3y ago

I ended up thinking "I bet I can stick half the old UI in that "Styles" section on the new UI, turns out you can and still have plenty left over. I put the remainder of the elements on top of their new counterparts. https://imgur.com/a/N5H9QTH https://imgur.com/a/N5H9QTH

marcosdumay 3y ago

> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace If you look harder, the icons are larger. Single icons got replaced by more explanatory content. The "expands" symbol is larger. And there are more actions crammed into the toolbar. Also, yes, there's a lot of whitespace. But let's not forget the reason MS redesigned the office toolbars. It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen.

hulitu 3y ago
> It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen. This was true only for people who didn't know how to use a computer. And the fault was on MS side. By default, after installation, every MS Office program had the screen filled with toolbars. And, surprise, surprise, today is the same. The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. And you cannot have individual toolbars anymore. It is all or nothing. And this is for the native programm. The "web" version is a total disaster in GUI design.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. Which wasn't a problem in ye olde times with 4:3 screens dominating the landscape, but nowadays is with 16:9 screens.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Like I said before, everything is a fashion magazine these days. It's pretty to look at.. but it also causes distraction, because when you can't see everything you need, you're forced to scroll, swipe, or tab out of your focus. The big problem with tabbing out is that HN is right around the corner.

ernst_klim 3y ago

I think the whitespace issue is mostly due to the ubiquity of touch interfaces. Even a good chunk of laptops do have touchscreens now, so deskop designers have to consider them even if they didn't eat the adaptive pill. With computer mouse you can use much smaller and denser controls of course.

dumdumchan 3y ago
Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. This is what made the old UI look organized.
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  Mobile first touch friendly design dominates designer minds. It looks modern and fresh. Desktop friendly UI unfortunately looks dated, old-school and rarely used nowadays even for desktop only apps.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    I predict that in a couple years, someone will produce an app that uses old "dated" UI styles and people will suddenly praise it for being clear and intuitive. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
- tiagod 3y ago
  >Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads. > I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?). My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this). -- [1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks. [2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch [3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons [4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!

KronisLV 3y ago

> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. I wanted to see how LibreOffice would compare on my netbook, and frankly it's better than the new Word, but still "worse" than the old version: https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png That said, at least LibreOffice lets you have your custom themes and actually offers a variety of different interface layouts, which I think is a nice touch: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface > Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation. To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with this. That's also why I rather enjoyed the Redmond theme even in *nix distros. There's just something so very usable about the old Windows look and more modern attempts, such as SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/ and even ReactOS https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/

deleted 3y ago

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perryizgr8 3y ago

> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation. Everything about that theme was perfection. If you disable all kinds of animations, then it becomes even better.

kwanbix 3y ago

100% agree. The first time I noticed, I came up with the name "toy interfaces". They look very nice but have very little substance. And to think that one of the most versatile and used interfaces is a spreadsheet, which has very dense information. Talking about old vs new, you would never convince me that the abomination that is the ribbon is better than the previous interface (menus/icons).

angryzor 3y ago

This is a very tech-literate user opinion on this matter. Having lived together with a UI designer for over 5 years I have come to appreciate the art and science of UI design. Whereas before I would have had the same opinion, I can now better see a UI through the eyes of an end user, and the larger amount of white space is definitely an improvement. It's about allowing space for your eyes to rest, it's about providing clear compartments in the UI that pop out immediately, instead of a compressed mess where everything seems to blend together. Ideally you should know where to click seconds after deciding you want to do something, even as a new user. UI design is not just some designer deciding that something looks good and just doing it that way. UI/UX design is not some "beautiful interaction layer" that you put on top of the actual "real part" of the application. A lot of software developers (me included originally) seem to think that way, I don't know why, maybe it's a bias in education. UI design is an integral part of the software development process, and I would argue more important than the programming itself. In fact, it should be the primary source of decisions that we make in our choices behind the software development process, not the other way around. UI/UX design is the art and science of looking at your product the way a user would look at it, making it as accessible and intuitive as possible. It is the art and science of making the product that your user wants and needs, instead of whatever you think they need. The decisions made in UI design (like "adding more whitespace") are not made arbitrarily. They are not made because someone thinks it looks pretty. They are the result of years of user research and A/B testing, just like our programming paradigms are the result of years of research. It would be arrogant to dismiss all this effort by millions of people based on personal opinion. That being said, the Office ribbon is a complete clusterfuck, and kind of the worst example you can find of modern UI design. That also being said, I do think the original post is making a false comparison. Of course UI's will be designed to fit the technology of their age. If you only have limited screen space you want to conserve it as much as possible, hence why the toolbar approach was chosen for Word 97, as even screens of 1024x768 resolution were rare back then. The ribbon UI was designed for an age where larger screens were common and it could be afforded to take up more pixels. In fact if you were to put a 40px toolbar on a modern 4K screen it would be tiny, hard to see and hard to click on. Putting the modern ribbon UI on an old 800x600 screen that it was not at all designed for is pushing an agenda.

jug 3y ago

> It's whitespace. There's wayyyy too much god damn whitespace in modern UIs, and it's awful. Maybe sometimes it is, but not in the article. The article in fact has multiple problems. 1. The titlebar of the _host virtual machine_ is included in the offensive version. This is probably not a coincidence but to exaggerate the issue. 2. The ribbon bar that combines the title bar and menu bar of old in fact consumes _less_ precious vertical space. 3. The icon spacing is roughly the same in both screenshots. 4. The major "offender" in white space is the different layout being used but that has nothing to do with UI design but everything to do with giving plenty of space for header and footer editing, and showing "real life" page margins -- the print layout! The Word 9x screenshot doesn't use/have that display mode. It's not WYSIWYG. That display mode can usually be disabled, at least in the latest Word versions. Case closed. It's a rubbish article especially because this CAN be a problem in modern UI's and there are plenty of better examples.

rwmj 3y ago

You might like Haiku with its glorious 90s GUI. Very discoverable and incredibly responsive.

albrewer 3y ago

> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX I held on to Windows 7 until the EOL date and I was forced to upgrade by my company for this reason. Minimal padding, clear borders and drag targets, high contrast coloring, no animations; it was far better usability-wise.

Borg3 3y ago

Hell yeah. Im still using my dated Win2003 desktop (classic theme) to do most work. Clear UI, fast. When I have to use my corpo Win10 I get chills. Terrible UI, slow UX, everything just gets in the way so you cannot do your job.